Developer Support Beyond FAQ, Forums and Documentation. First class support for your API

Processing an API request often means directly or indirectly interacting with 2 or more systems. Is your support team equipped with the necessary training, tools, information and support infrastructure to be successful?

IT Assist helps you design and implement your API support strategy and infrastructure, offer training to your support team and as needed handle your developer support.

Tools to monitor and integrate with operational data available from all systems in an API request's call path as well as integrate with their helpdesk system.

Tools to regularly run test cycles and alert when systems are not functioning as expected.

Managing and Troubleshooting Support Cases

Knowing all the players involved and having the information necessary to know what support group to reach out to when troubleshooting a customer support case.

Once the support group is known then it is about making sure they have the information necessary to troubleshoot the problem and working under their sla and processes to track status so you can manage the customer's expectation on root cause and ETA.

After Office Hour Support

Discussions of support tend to focus on helping developers write their applications and complete their integration. However, once integrated, using an API means an ongoing relationship - outages, slowness, changes etc. Therefore it is critical to ensure support is available to respond to runtime issues that more often than not occur after hours.

Impact of subscriber lifecycle and privacy settings

Subscriber lifecycle and its impact to an API is an area that triggers many support cases. Dealing with impacts to an API caused by subscriber deactivation, change, account change, privacy settings change etc. and being able to communicate with your customer the specific type of change that affected the API when they report an issue.

Outage & Maintenance Notifications

Communicating maintenance and outage information to your customers has its challenges when dealing with back-end systems that have their own maintenance schedule and reporting approach. This is further complicated when the back-end system is managed and owned by a vendor.

API Certification, OnBoarding & Sandbox Environment

For some companies the on-boarding process involves more than a simple self-registration step. The process requires multiple approval steps within a defined business workflow including API certification.

A great customer on-boarding experience can be a daunting task with these requirements. It means developing a product that automates the approval workflow and API certification so that your customers get timely feedback each step of the way.

How we help

Support Strategy Design & Implementation

IT Assist provides solutions to solve the challenges your support and operations team currently faces or might experience. While you focus on building out your API, we make sure you are equipped to deliver great developer support.

Leveraging the systems that are already in place, integrating for automation, analyzing all call flows and impacted organizations streamlines and optimizes your support process.

Tool Development, Automation & Integration

IT Assist can recommend and develop tools geared towards improving the support team's efficiency by determining pain points and developing solutions to address them.

Tools to monitor and integrate with operational data available from all systems in an API request's call path as well as integrate with their helpdesk system.

Training

Develop and provide troubleshooting centric training to support teams that focuses on potential issues and how to troubleshoot them. Integrated with the training is tool development to move past static how to guides.

Training to increase the understanding of the relevant underlying technology, architecture, impacted applications groups to expedite the triage process and root cause determination.>

Sample Applications, SDK & Technical Documentation

Designing and developing interesting application use cases which showcase API capabilities in a real world scenario.

We can also serve as your support team, assisting with business related on-boarding tasks and providing development and testing support for applications. This includes web forum moderation, developer conferences, hackatons, email/telephone/helpdesk support and specialized services for enterprise partners.

Audit Support Setup & API UX Review

Analyze ticket flow and review support cases to pinpoint areas for improvement and develop actionable metrics to help streamline operations.

Review and provide feedback on your help and resource center for availability of FAQ, troubleshooting tips, use cases, feedback tools, documentation, forums and other channels to provide API user support and engagement.

UX review of your API for ease of use and appropriate error messages to maximize developer productivity and success to drive down the number of support questions.